


Outrageous Fortune

by Corinna



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: Acting, After season 1, F/M, Hollywood, Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare, Yuletide 2006
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-25
Updated: 2006-12-25
Packaged: 2017-12-06 18:03:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/738546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corinna/pseuds/Corinna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eventually, Jack took Kate to meet his agent. "He'll love you," Jack said.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Outrageous Fortune

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sansets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sansets/gifts).



> Many thanks to Sab and Livia for their assistance

When they got back from Hawaii, where they were married on the beach by an Elvis impersonator wearing a lei, they settled down in Los Angeles, with dinners and buying towels and lots and lots of sex. Eventually, Jack took Kate to meet his agent. "He'll love you," Jack said.

Sam Hertzbein's office was big and bright, with a view of the hills. Sam Hertzbein himself was a short man, tanned and wiry, with ropy muscles in his neck. "Katie! Nice to meet you. Jack here says you're a genius."

"Oh, well." Kate could feel herself blushing. "Jack's a little biased."

"She really is," Jack said. He put his hand on her lower back, reassuring. "I told her you could hook her up."

"Indeed I can," said Sam. "Indeed I can. We're a full-service firm, and nothing, nothing is too good for Jack Crew and his wife, the genius."

Kate was assigned her own agent, Jennifer, a young blonde with an office two floors down from Sam's. "You must be Kate! We're going to have so much fun."

"We are?" said Kate.

"Of course we are! You're super-cute. People are going to be falling all over themselves for you, just you wait. OK? First, we're gonna have to get you some headshots."

"Oh, I have headshots."

"Canadian headshots. We'll get you some real ones. And then you'll start doing auditions. I have a couple of things in the pipeline I think you'd be perfect for. They're smaller parts, but that's really how you want to start. You don't want the pressure of having to carry a whole movie by yourself your first time out, do you? A smaller part where you can make an impression, get noticed, that's what you want. Think of Matt Damon! He had ten minutes in that Meg Ryan movie, but they were great minutes. A year later, he had an Oscar!"

"But he won the Oscar for best screenplay," Kate said.

"Exactly. You see? All sorts of doors open for you with a good first impression."

Kate left Jennifer's office with an appointment with a photographer, three movie auditions, and a headache.

\-----

Jack had told Sam he wanted more prestige work, something to prove his Hamlet wasn't a joke or a fluke. Sam got him a week's work on a Coen Brothers film, and Jack and Kate spent a weekend out at Catalina to celebrate. On Monday, Sam came back with the script for the third of Jack's three contracted films, another action movie.

"You gotta maintain the brand, Jack," Sam said. "You can't let your audience forget you."

"He's got a point," Jack said to Kate when Sam drove off. "I mean, it's not acting, not the way Geoffrey does acting, but I like doing it. And the money's good."

The movie was called _Threat Level: Unstoppable_ , and it filmed in Thailand, Vietnam, Surinam, and Toronto. ("Toronto really does look like so many other places," Kate's mother said when she called home. "I've always said so.") They made plans for Kate to come visit during the filming, but by that point, she was already playing Nurse #3 in Diane Keaton's _Missing Mom_ , so she spent that week on a sound stage in LA, drinking the same cold coffee from the same Styrofoam cup, take after take after take, missing Jack and Toronto and wondering what the hell she was doing.

\------

They celebrated their one-year anniversary with a trip to Paris and London. Jack had been to London for press junkets and premieres, but he had never seen anything of the city outside the suites at the St. Regis, so he let himself get carried away on Kate's enthusiasm for playing tourist. He let her instruct him in the art of a proper tea, and in turn he made some phone calls and found them a rave, where loud music and Ecstasy pounded through them till morning. They walked the halls of the British Museum, whispering jokes in each other's ears about the art. In Westminster Abbey, Jack pretended to be a zombie risen from the tomb of Henry III, and chased Kate giggling up and down the aisles until a guard threatened to throw them out. They were still good together, in ways Kate couldn't have anticipated when they'd met. Jack hadn't turned into some caricature of himself in LA, the way her friends had warned her that he would. He was still the same sweet guy she'd fallen for in New Burbage.

Their last night, they went to the Globe Theatre to see _As You Like It_. The stage was out in the open air, with seating and a groundling's yard on three sides, just like in Shakespeare's day, and their seats in the middle gallery were still so close to the stage that they could see the embroidery on the actors' costumes. Kate started crying in Act II and didn't stop until the play was over.

\-----

"I'm not depressed, I was moved!" Kate insisted over the phone to her mother. "Of course I cried. It's great art."

"It's a comedy, dear," said her mother. Kate hung up.

\-----

In the fall, Jack did a movie with Soderbergh. Kate got a fifteen-line part. Her agent Jennifer said, "Steven thought your audition was fantastic": Kate knew it was because Jack had asked. He wouldn't admit it, but he couldn't look her in the eye when she tried to talk to him about it.

Jennifer remained optimistic about Kate's career, even when, without Jack's intervention, Kate's work still mostly consisted of women with numbers instead of names: Girl #2, Stewardess #4. "You have to build a strong foundation if you're going to climb to the sky!"

"What if I did some theater?" Kate asked.

"That's not the way to make a career in acting," said Jennifer.

\-----

The Soderbergh film came out in the spring, and Jack did interviews out on their deck where he talked about his evolution into a serious actor. Kate took to driving around LA with the top down, every fantasy she'd ever had in New Burbage come true, except she felt disconnected, like she was watching her life from a distance. Jack took her out to dinner, made her laugh with stories about the stupid things the reporters asked, but it didn't help, as much as he wanted it to. She wasn't sure what would.

Going down Melrose through Hollywood, she saw what looked like a white stucco bungalow with a sign propped out up front: _Auditions Today_. She frowned at it, and parked in the unevenly paved lot. Hollywood, the neighborhood, was a really seedy place. At first she'd found it funny that Jack and his friends wouldn't go near it, but she'd picked up their prejudices, and found herself scanning the lot for carjackers as she set the car alarm.

Walking in the door, she was hit with the smells of stale beer, sweat, and chalk. The entry hall was painted black, and there were black and white posters for _Peer Gynt_ and _The Seagull_ on the left wall. "Equity?" asked the woman at the front desk.

"Um. Should I be?"

"No. We can't afford Equity. Sign in here." She tapped on a clipboard. "We're seeing people in the order they come in."

"Uh, I was wondering -- what sort of theater is this?"

The woman raised her eyebrows. "You're here for the auditions and you don't know why?"

"You had a sign out front."

The woman considered this, and eventually nodded, conceding Kate's point. "We're The Company of Strangers. We do classical and contemporary; the audition's for _Much Ado About Nothing_. The Shakespeare play?"

"Oh, I know," Kate said. "I was at New Burbage."

The woman gave her a skeptical assessing look. "OK," she finally said. Kate got a flash of herself the way the woman saw her: the streaky blonde highlights, the Gucci sunglasses perched on top of her head, the designer jeans, and the t-shirt from the Whiskey. She didn't look like an actress; she looked like Jack Crew's wife.

"I played Ophelia for Geoffrey Tennant," Kate insisted.

"That's nice," said the woman. "Sign in: you're tenth."

\----- 

She got cast as Hero. "You're too young for the lead anyhow," Jack said when he read the play. "Besides, this way you show them what you've got, right?"

Her agent just pursed her perfectly bowed lips. "A stage run out in Hollywood? In a secondary role? Honey, that's not showing a commitment to the work."

But Kate hadn't felt this committed to the work since New Burbage. A small part, in a small theater, something no one would see, and it made her as giddy as playing a lead on the main stage at the Swan. It helped that everyone involved with the play was so nice: the core group of Strangers, as they called themselves, the other actors who'd been cast in supporting parts, the crew, even the woman who'd doubted Kate at the door. She turned out to be Amanda, the stage manager, and her sense of humor helped keep the crew buoyant when things went wrong. Things went wrong a lot.

The Strangers were running their theater on a shoestring, and a fraying one at that. Kate showed up one afternoon to find the cast rehearsing out in the parking lot -- the electricity had been shut off for non-payment. Tom, the general manager, spent half his time applying for grants and the other half fighting with creditors. The bathroom plumbing was temperamental, and the lighting rig was so precarious that Kate held her breath every time anyone went up there. But, on the other hand, there was Tricia.

Tricia was the director, and on the very first day of rehearsals, after the introductions and the talk about logistics and schedules, she'd raised her hands to encompass the whole cast and crew on the risers.

"The theater is an empty box," she said. "It's our job to fill it with fury, and ecstasy, and with revolution. Let's get going."

Tricia wasn't the sort of director who'd laugh when Beatrice put the right spin on a punchline, or applaud when Don John gave a particularly menacing account of his villainy. She wasn't interested in flattering her cast. Instead, she spent time with them working through the character's motivations, tying thought and deed and iambic pentameter together to make something electrifying.

Kate had always thought of Hero as a one-dimensional character, a flat cardboard cutout of virtuousness. But with Tricia's help, she found Hero's courage, and her heart. She stood out on the deck, reciting lines into the sunset while Jack worked out with his trainer. She jogged in the morning while reciting the lines in her head, looking for the rhythm of them in her feet and in her veins. And finally, at the end of a rehearsal of Act Four, when she fell to the floor in the depths of Hero's despair, Tricia said, "And to think they call this one of the comedies. Tomorrow at ten, everyone."

Kate fucked Jack on the living room floor that night, and he shouted when he came.

\----- 

"You know," Kate ventured after the tech rehearsal, "we could do one performance as a benefit for the theater. Charge extra for tickets, and put the money towards a general fund. My husband knows a lot of powerful people --"

"We didn't found this theater for powerful people," Tricia said. "We founded it for everyone else. For the people who can't afford orchestra seats at the Mark Taper Forum. I'm not going to price them out of this building as well."

"But it would just be for one night. And it would get us all sorts of publicity..."

"Us? Kate, you're very good, and I hope we work with you again. But you're too new here to be speaking for the Strangers."

Kate turned away quickly, her eyes already watering. She stumbled towards the door, head down, so she didn't see Tom, the general manager, until he'd caught her by the arm.

"Tricia gets emphatic about things," he said kindly. "Let's talk more about that benefit later."

\----- 

The benefit was set for the last week of the run. Tricia got ten seats held back for $5 rush tickets and called it a victory. Jack had his agent make a few calls, and the benefit was sold out in a day, all at the $500 a seat Patron level.

"We're in the black for the first time since... ever," Tom said. "We should hire more actresses who've never heard of us."

Opening night, Kate sat backstage, applying her makeup and riding the adrenaline wave. Tricia came back to wish them a good performance, and she made a point of stopping to put a hand on Kate's shoulder.

"I'm sorry I snapped at you when you suggested doing a benefit," she said. "Tom always says my pride's my worst enemy. If the wealthy people of Los Angeles want to subsidize our work here, on our terms, well, who am I to say no?"

"Thanks," Kate said, meeting Tricia's eyes in the makeup mirror. "I appreciate it."

"And as to the other, well, Kate, your commitment to the theater, and to this theater, means a lot. You'll always be a Stranger to me."

Kate blinked back the tears that were threatening to destroy her eye makeup. "Thank you, Tricia. That means a lot."

Josh, who played Claudio, came in to the women's dressing area, one hand theatrically covering his eyes. "You ladies are never going to believe who's out there tonight," he said. "Jack Crew! You think he thought this was the version with Claire Danes?"

Kate smiled, and blotted her eyelashes.

\----- 

She had one line, total, in the first scene, so she let herself sneak a look out at the audience. Jack was sitting fifth-row center, with a bouquet of lilies in his lap. He caught her watching him, and he winked. She blushed and looked down, but that was in character anyhow, so no one else noticed.

\-----

When the performance was over, Jack came backstage. During rehearsals, she'd been so careful not to talk about Jack: even suggesting the benefit had been a stretch, something she wouldn't have done except for the two days of having to pee at the Burger King across the street. But after the curtain came down, in the exhilaration and the joy of taking an audience through the whole of the play, enmity to love story, sorrow to hope, and finally dancing offstage in the arms of her Claudio, all of that had stopped mattering. The Strangers knew and liked her for herself now, and it was time they knew the man she loved as well. When Jack came down the hall, cautiously calling her name, she jumped up from the makeup table and ran into his arms.

For a moment, she was back in New Burbage, high on new love and _Hamlet_ , but reality came back to her quickly. She was here in LA, with Jack, wrapped in his familiar strength, and her new friends among the Strangers were all trying not to stare. She kissed him hard, for happiness and success, and he pulled her so close she could smell the lilies getting crushed between them.

"Did you like it?" she asked a little breathlessly when they finally broke the kiss.

"Like it? Kate, you were amazing." Jack's smile was so big, so delighted and boyish. It was the same way he'd looked on the beach in Hawaii, like he couldn't believe his luck. "You were on fire. You got inside that girl's skin. It was amazing."

"Really?" she said, pleased.

"Of course really. I happen to know a little something about Shakespeare, so you know I'm right." He smiled at her, and pushed a lock of hair back off her face. "You belong up there, baby."

"I know," she said, resting her cheek against his shoulder. "I won't forget it again."


End file.
